Monday, September 29, 2014

Game of the Day (9/28/14)

Last year, on the final day of the season, Henderson Alvarez threw a no-hitter, and the Marlins won the game in the ninth on a walkoff wild pitch.

This year, there was no walkoff, wild pitch or otherwise. But there was a no-hitter, with Zimmermann the man responsible. (Well, Zimmermann and Stephen Souza Jr., the defensive replacement who made a rather remarkable diving catch in left field to secure the game's final out.)

Thanks to the lack of any of the three potential ties in the standings after yesterday's games, the 2014 regular season is now at an end. The Marlins were one of the three teams that sat very close together at the top of the excitement standings; getting no-hit in their 162nd game moved them ahead of the Indians from third into second, trailing only the Phillies. On the other end of things, the Rangers were the dullest team of the year, finishing just behind the Mariners in that "race."

The average game from the 2014 season as a whole had a WPL of 2.66, the second-lowest of the six full (or nearly full, in the case of 1984, which has a couple of days remaining) campaigns in my database. The reasons for that are worthy of further examination - but that's an entire post's worth of talk, and I'll have time to get to it now that the offseason is coming up.